An American Harvest Page 3

  I shall never forget seeing our dad stand there quietly taking the abuse, particularly from one man whose crippled son was wetted. The man cried, “Now you think you’re doing something by sending your boys away to school; now what are you getting out of it?”

  We knew we were wrong, double-dyed wrong, and said so, but Dad didn’t ever lecture us on it. He didn’t ever say anything to us. If he had just said something it would have eased it up a little.

  HOWARD:

  There were times, every few Sundays or so, when we would be invited out to our neighbors for dinner. It was quite fashionable, a general practice in fact. We would go down to Mr. Lindsay Zimmerman’s, or over to Uncle Dave’s, or up to Mr. Wilson’s, or over to Mr. Tesh’s. I recall quite well—when we would be invited down to Mr. Lindsay Zimmerman’s— that quite frequently Miss Battie would leave church with us, and we would all go down there about twelve thirty or one o’clock.

  Then they would go out and catch the chicken, kill it, pick it, and when they got it cooked, we’d have dinner. It became quite an affair, and in the meantime others were getting vegetables together—the whole meal fixed after we had left the church. This wasn’t true in all places, but was in this particular case. Most families had made necessary preparations beforehand, and we didn’t have to wait over an hour for lunch.

  ARTHUR:

  Except for the children and some of the women, maybe, who’d have to wait and eat at the second table.

  HOWARD:

  Yes, or even a third table sometimes.

  BLANCHE:

  I think we ought to make this remark about Miz Battie’s dinner though. When you finally sat down to eat, you never sat down to a better meal.

  LUTHER:

  Except on one occasion, when I was a small boy—I was so embarrassed—she served some little cakes, and the ants were crawling all over them. I wasn’t old enough to know better, so I said, “Miz Battie, there are ants in your cakes.” I’ll never forget it.

  BLANCHE:

  Naturally the ants liked her cakes; everybody did. Her spice and marble cakes were otherworldly, and her pies, oh my: blackberry, peach, dewberry, cherry. I could always make room for a piece even after eating all I thought I could hold of her stewed up chicken, biscuits and gravy, tasty thin slices of fried country ham, cukes and onions swimming in vinegar, buttered corn, lima beans, rape, mustard or turnip greens flavored with a bit of fat-back, or, as a special treat maybe, winter-cress, and a dollop of sweet potato with more milk gravy—there was always plenty of gravy.

  My hunger was extra at Aunt Battie’s house. Perhaps it was partly because there were three to four women present who’d do most of the fixin’s, and I could be free to go play with the boys a bit before it was time for us little ones to eat. Food fixin’ was all women’s work and I was glad to be excused from it on such occasions.

  I do now enjoy cooking, but that plus all the other things the women had to do made for a right physical type existence, the likes of which I’m glad I grew away from.

  Of course if the Sunday dinner was at home I wouldn’t be excused. Momma’d take charge, and I’d have to help all the way through the first, second, sometimes third servings. First we’d serve the men and any women who were part of a guest couple, then, if necessary, another table-full. The third finally would be mostly children, and Momma and I’d get to sit down for a spell.

  When I was a child, our Sunday dinners were special as well, but with almost all store-bought fixings. Out-of-season vegetables like peas and string beans came frozen by Mr. Birdseye, and the chicken would not have been running about an hour before cooking.

  In warmer seasons, Mom sometimes packed a big picnic dinner; we’d invite friends and relatives and drive down to a big open place called Flat Rock surrounded by woods on our farm. We hunted for wild flowers, acorns, butternuts; dipped in the pool of a bordering stream, then warmed by the outdoor fireplace where fumes from grilling hamburgers, hotdogs, and store-bought buns whetted our appetites. We roasted marshmallows and crunched them between two Nabisco graham crackers laced with melting Hershey’s chocolate bars for dessert.

  Occasionally, when Pop came home with a wallet full of cash for some case he’d taken on, we’d drive to Montreal for a grand dinner out at the Queens Hotel where frugal Mom cautioned, “Read the menu from the less expensive meals at bottom, not the other way round.”

  As the only girl, I don’t remember being called upon to put out a lot of effort in meal preparations. I helped, but not in the way of Blanche. I and my youngest brother, Jonny, occasionally earned spending money by helping out at Mom’s formal dinner parties: I waitressed; Jonny washed dishes; I dried.

  CHAPTER 3

  Strive to Please

  BLANCHE:

  Like some of the rest of you, I wrote down some of my memories before we met here tonight, and I’d like to read the part describing our daily routine, mine, I mean, with Momma.

  We worked together a lot, Momma and I. We would rise before dawn, and while the boys were out doing the chores, we would start a good fire in the old wood stove. As the kitchen slowly warmed, we prepared the breakfast. It might be fried thin sliced ham or sausage with water gravy and hot baking powder biscuits, or eggs and fried mush. (Mush is corn meal boiled up the day before with a little bacon, put aside to cool and glutinize, then sliced and fried in bacon grease.) Or we would fix a kind of cereal dish made up of crisp toasted homemade bread, ground up and dowsed with sugar and cream. Then there was pie: apple, peach, persimmon, pumpkin, or the old standby sweet potato pie. Breakfast was big at our house.

  HOWARD:

  And mighty good after an hour or two’s hard labor outside.

  BLANCHE:

  Sometimes I wished I could have traded places with you boys.

  KENNETH:

  Well, Blanche, we helped around the house some. I mean there were too many of us boys to leave all the housework to just you and Momma. Most other homes had a number of girls, and boys generally didn’t help out much around the house, but our case was different. We always made our own beds; we often shared in setting the table, cleaning the house, clearing and washing the dishes.

  HOWARD:

  And carrying in the wood, the water, and taking out the slop. We had no plumbing of course, not even a kitchen sink with a drain. Had to go out to the well, lower the bucket about sixty feet to water level, raise it up full by cranking away on the windlass, then carry it into the house.

  BLANCHE:

  It’s true, you boys did help some, and Momma never worked in the fields. I’d help a little at harvest time. Momma’d sometimes get the vegetables from the garden, but unlike other women in the community, she never cultivated the gardens around the house, and neither of us milked the cows.

  In addition to the regular help from you boys, Arthur actually took over the housework for spells when Momma began having severe sick headaches before I was old enough to take charge. He did the cooking and ironing and directed the activities of us younger children. He was a good cook, and we bragged about him to the whole neighborhood.

  ARTHUR:

  That part, the bragging in the neighborhood, I particularly did not like.

  BLANCHE:

  Well, let me continue here with what I’ve written about my recollection of the daily chores.

  After breakfast, nine in the mornings, we baked pies or bread and cooked for the men and boys who would come in at noon ravishingly hungry. Dinner was mostly vegetables of various kinds. That was during the long summer months; the rest of the year, when we children were going to school, we’d take a packed lunch.

  In the afternoons we sewed, mended, or cut carpet rags. There was something akin to miraculous about taking old faded, ragged garments, cutting them into strips, tacking the ends of the strips together, winding the long strips into balls, then taking huge boxes of balls to the neighborhood weaver; and, a few weeks later, bringing home bright new carpeting to be the pride of the house.

  Making s
hirts and dresses also brought satisfaction and wonderment at Momma’s skill in copying pictured garments from mail-order catalogues such as Bellas-Hess and Montgomery Ward. A sewing machine ordered from Bellas-Hess made sewing easier. Nearly all of our clothes were hand made.

  There was seasonal work also. We canned large quantities of vegetables and fruits at harvest time. A variety of beans, including black-eyed peas, were dried and stored. Beets, little and big cucumbers, got pickled and put away in jars. Sauerkraut, made by shredding cabbage, salting and packing it into an earthen crock, covering it with water and weighting it down with a rock on top of a china plate just big enough to fit into the top of the crock, was ready to eat after souring in its own juices for two to three weeks.

  Potatoes, turnips, squash, when kept in the basement, lasted through the winter into spring. Hominy, a favorite at our table, was made by soaking dried corn kernels in lye and, after thorough rinsing, scrubbing the kernels between the hands to remove the softened seed coats. When boiled with a bit of fat-back it made a tasty dish.

  All of these foods along with chickens and eggs, milk, cottage cheese, and butter—which we churned once a week—an occasional slaughtered calf and two or three hogs, kept us amply supplied throughout the year, We bought very little: only sugar, salt, and a few other condiments. Even our flour came from our wheat, which was ground at the local mill at Enterprise.

  We never ate out at a restaurant. I didn’t know what one looked like until I was grown. Besides Sunday dinner now and then at the home of relatives or friends, there was an occasional church supper, which we children were allowed to attend. These were our only opportunities to eat outside the home.

  Of course this meant that Momma never, except in times of illness, obtained relief from kitchenly duties. The kitchen might change, the amount and kind of work might vary, but the need to prepare food never left.

  And I can assure you boys that the work seemed, at times, as tedious to us womenfolk as the work in the fields must have seemed to you.

  ARTHUR:

  That may be, sister, it’s the relentless pressure of such work that tends to get you down. To tell you the truth, I kind of enjoyed the times when I was brought in from the fields to work in the kitchen when Mother was feeling poorly, because it meant a change of scene for me. I protested some, naturally enough—I thought it not quite manly. But if that kind of nonsense hadn’t prevailed (the notion that kitchen work was woman’s work and fieldwork was man’s work) I believe we might’ve switched off duties now and again just to relieve the tedium. It might have helped a good deal.

  HOWARD:

  Well, I may be old-fashioned, but I still think kitchen work is woman’s work. I’ll get on out there and push the mower over the grass, trim up the hedges, and such things like that, but I’ll leave Miz Cat get on in there and fix the meals. She doesn’t want me messin’ around in her kitchen anyways.

  ARTHUR:

  As Blanch mentioned, our mother had sicknesses. She needed extra help, especially at those times when she was feeling poorly.

  I want to read something I have about that:

  I remember with great grief still her intense headaches, migraine, Dr. Bob called it. On one occasion she was sitting out on the back doorstep—said her head was about to burst. She said, “Go call Dad.” I did, and he soon came.

  She said, “Frank, if you will press my head from front to back just as hard as you can, I believe it will help.” Dad was then quite a strong man, and I saw him hesitate, but when she again asked him to do it, he did. He took her head in his hands, front to back, and pressed firmly. She said, “No, that’s not enough. If you can press much harder maybe it will help.” He did. It seemed to me that her skull would crush under the force. It didn’t. Her headaches continued.

  BLANCHE:

  Those headaches did continue, but between times she sang while she worked. She always sang. She sang hymns unless she wasn’t feeling well; her silence was how we could tell when another sick spell was coming on.

  HOWARD:

  You know, Blanche, you failed to make mention of the special foods we had at Eastertime and Christmas. They were somewhat uplifting, you might say—the Moravian sugar cakes and colored eggs at Easter for example.

  ARTHUR:

  Those eggs tasted nearly as good as they looked, after the Easter Sunrise Service. Playing in the band at a cemetery that early in the morning cost a lot of wind and caused a mighty hunger. But the Service was always memorable— the beauty of the dawn coming on over the setting of row upon row of stretched out tombstones, reposing on the spring-green lawn patterned with long moving shadows of towering pines and oaks; and the sound of the brasses out there in the openness, playing the grand old German chorales—it always made me tearful almost.

  Moravian graveyard.

  It seemed a fitting way to celebrate Easter, and it’s one of the loveliest religious ceremonies anywhere. I’ve missed it to this day since we left our childhood years in Welcome.

  Well then, there was Christmas too with its special traditions of the paper thin, spicy Moravian cookies, some candies maybe, and oranges, and always the fun of choosing and cutting just the right cedar for a tree to bring into the house and trim up with popcorn, tinsel, and candles.

  KENNETH:

  Juniper.

  ARTHUR:

  How’s that? Oh, the tree you’re talking about. We always called them cedars.

  JOHN:

  That doesn’t make them cedars.

  ARTHUR:

  Guess you’re right at that. All right. We defer to you botanist boys. We trimmed a juniper tree for Christmas, which we in our ignorance called a cedar.

  LUTHER:

  Better change my ways, I reckon. I’m ignorant too, Arthur. I always called them cedars; do to this day.

  But there were other special occasions: don’t forget the ice-cream socials in the summertime—lawn parties we sometimes called them. Ice cream’s never since tasted so good, made up of thick cream, eggs and sugar, with peaches, strawberries, bananas, or just plain vanilla or chocolate for flavoring. I’d take turns churning, and by the time it was ready, we were more than ready. My mouth readies now just thinking about it.

  Then we young folks would sometimes play games at the socials or at the church suppers—you know, boy and girl games like Bingo-go-go where the girls tapped the boys they liked on the shoulder, or Farmer in the Dell, things like that. Perfectly innocent ’til a couple might sneak away from the crowd, out behind a barn or some trees and not be missed for a spell. I ‘spect many a romance got started that way.

  BLANCHE:

  I know of some for sure. Then there was always blackberrying on the Fourth of July. Come storm or sun, we’d go en mass to pick blackberries all morning long—I usually ate more than I saved. To this day, I associate the Fourth of July with a queasy stomach and itchyness from chigger bites.

  JOHN:

  Those chiggers had a special affinity for the ankles, the middle, and certain private parts. They’d bother a guy something awful for weeks.

  HOWARD:

  Worse than the seven-year itch, ’cause there wasn’t a thing a fellow could do about ’em except scratch.

  There were no fireworks then, that place, that time. As a city girl in the nineteen thirties, I celebrated the birth of our nation by making noise and blowing up tin cans. Dad gave a dollar to each if us little kids to spend as we wished for punk, cherry bombs, fire crackers, snakes, salutes—all to perpetrate mayhem. Come evening, we packed a picnic and joined relatives up in the mountains to shoot off rockets, flares, pinwheels; watch the embers drift to the pond, sizzle, then snuff out—no chiggers, just an occasional itch from mosquito or black fly bites.

  BLANCHE:

  Well, after the blackberrying, besides scratching to do, there’d be blackberries to preserve—always plenty of work in the kitchen.

  ARTHUR:

  Yes, we worked hard on the farm. But then, we had Sundays, a day of rest from farmin
g. Let’s talk about how that felt.

  CHAPTER 4

  Beware of Evil

  RALPH:

  I remember Sundays being rather free from work

  Except the daily chores

  Going to Sunday School and staying for preaching, if any

  Some mornings at Friedburg, four miles from home where we were members

  But more often at Mount Olivet, up the road a quarter of a mile

  Then again to Sunday School in the afternoon at Enterprise

  A mile and a half away.

  JOHN:

  Most of our social activities were associated with three churches: the Moravian at Friedburg and Enterprise, and the Methodist, Mount Olivet. We attended them all—sometimes all three on the same Sunday. I think our parents were essentially Fundamentalists. I have something I’ve written about our parents’ religious attitudes:

  Friedberg Moravian church.

  Mount Olivet Methodist church when the Rapers attended.

  Young Blanche.

  I remember, our home was bone dry, alcohol being held, along with card playing and dancing, as an instrument of the Devil, for the moral and spiritual corruption of the young and weak. I recall the harrowing chant of an itinerant preacher at one of those Revival meetings Luther mentioned: “Any man who can take a woman in his arms and go through the contortions of a modern dance without committing adultery in his heart is either more than a man, less than a man, or a damn liar.” And our parents said, “Amen.”

  BLANCHE:

  I reckon our mother believed that all right: I can’t forget, when I left home for school, Mama tried to get me to promise I would not dance. I refused to promise—but I never had the heart to try.

  Then, during vacations, the boys went on camping trips into the mountains with a party—including girls. I wasn’t allowed to go. These were things I couldn’t understand.

  But I would take issue with John’s saying our father was Fundamentalist. As a very little girl, I remember mentioning to him that a lot of people seemed to understand things about religion that I did not understand. Papa explained there were a lot of things he didn’t understand either, but we did what we could. Religion, he said, was simply to help you to be good, and if people were good, this was what was important. You need not worry because you could not understand all of it.